Let's do the Odyssey!
28th November 2017, 8:53 AM
(This post was last modified: 28th November 2017, 9:44 AM by Dark Jaguar.)
It is sooo good though! So good! And yes, like Banjo Kazooie they forgo the "single star at a time" system. You can stay in a world as long as you like, keeping the flow of the level going. Also, like Banjo Tooie, extra lives are now gone. Recent Mario games had already more or less negated the need to worry about lives by just tossing them out constantly (as well as allowing you to save the number of lives you have when you stop, which started with the Mario Advance remasters), so this is basically Nintendo officially acknowledging how pointless they have been for a while now anyway. It's a shame that familiar green mushroom and the accompanying chime aren't around, but onward to bigger and better things!
Minor quibbles:
No Hub World. The Odyssey ship you fly around in could have been a neat hub world, much like the Galaxy in Mario Galaxy, but it's basically a small room filled with mementos of your journey (and yes, that includes the occasional snow globe). That said, I don't miss having one that much. The individual worlds are rich and varied enough to provide all the fun I need. Maybe a hub world like Peach's Castle was never really needed for games like this. It could have been a fun bonus, but the game is amazing even without it.
Motion controls! This game forces them in where they aren't wanted or even remotely useful. Yes, they are "optional", but set up in such a way that the waggle is a more effective version of the moves you can do with a button. For example, you can frog jump with B, or SUPER frog jump with a waggle. Just a waggle, I should add. That's it. Since there's 3 unused "duplicate" buttons on the switch controller, there's no reason they couldn't map those to the "waggly" superior versions of various moves, except that Nintendo wants to justify motion controls in all their mainline games. I say I'm fine that they HAVE motion controls, but only use them in games where it makes sense or adds something to it.
Oh one last thing, the inconsistent art style. For the most part, the game has a cartoony look to it that fits what you expect in a Mario game. If you haven't played it, this is still the same world Mario games all take place in. There's no "Mario took a warp pipe to our world" component at all, he's just travelling his own world. That's why it's so odd that New Donk City goes for realistically proportioned characters. It's also odd to see realistic bones and dinosaurs in one of the earlier levels. There was a slight issue with this disparity in Breath of the Wild, where the cartoony characters kind of clashed with the more realistic backgrounds, but it's really on display in the city. Pauline aside, everyone there looks like a GTA character, and it's weeeird! I'm not the first to mention this, and I won't be the last, but their best bet was to go with townspeople that looked more like cartoon characters like Mario and Pauline. They can still look like they stepped right out of the 1930's on their way to the Daily Star to work with Clark Kent or whatever, just make them look cartoony! This is something that a rather significant asset patch could resolve, but I doubt Nintendo will. As it stands, it's just an Odyssey oddity.
Minor quibbles:
No Hub World. The Odyssey ship you fly around in could have been a neat hub world, much like the Galaxy in Mario Galaxy, but it's basically a small room filled with mementos of your journey (and yes, that includes the occasional snow globe). That said, I don't miss having one that much. The individual worlds are rich and varied enough to provide all the fun I need. Maybe a hub world like Peach's Castle was never really needed for games like this. It could have been a fun bonus, but the game is amazing even without it.
Motion controls! This game forces them in where they aren't wanted or even remotely useful. Yes, they are "optional", but set up in such a way that the waggle is a more effective version of the moves you can do with a button. For example, you can frog jump with B, or SUPER frog jump with a waggle. Just a waggle, I should add. That's it. Since there's 3 unused "duplicate" buttons on the switch controller, there's no reason they couldn't map those to the "waggly" superior versions of various moves, except that Nintendo wants to justify motion controls in all their mainline games. I say I'm fine that they HAVE motion controls, but only use them in games where it makes sense or adds something to it.
Oh one last thing, the inconsistent art style. For the most part, the game has a cartoony look to it that fits what you expect in a Mario game. If you haven't played it, this is still the same world Mario games all take place in. There's no "Mario took a warp pipe to our world" component at all, he's just travelling his own world. That's why it's so odd that New Donk City goes for realistically proportioned characters. It's also odd to see realistic bones and dinosaurs in one of the earlier levels. There was a slight issue with this disparity in Breath of the Wild, where the cartoony characters kind of clashed with the more realistic backgrounds, but it's really on display in the city. Pauline aside, everyone there looks like a GTA character, and it's weeeird! I'm not the first to mention this, and I won't be the last, but their best bet was to go with townspeople that looked more like cartoon characters like Mario and Pauline. They can still look like they stepped right out of the 1930's on their way to the Daily Star to work with Clark Kent or whatever, just make them look cartoony! This is something that a rather significant asset patch could resolve, but I doubt Nintendo will. As it stands, it's just an Odyssey oddity.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)